DES MOINES, Iowa — In August of 2014, just 19 months after joining the U.S. Senate, Ted Cruz was already reviled by many people in Washington. But that made him only more appealing to the dozens of grass-roots activists and conservative leaders who gathered in a room at Iowa State University on the weekend of Aug. 9 to meet with him on the sidelines of a socially conservative cattle call.

At Cruz’s request, conservative radio host Steve Deace had assembled a wide-ranging group that included libertarian Ron Paul acolytes and evangelical home schooling proponents, disillusionedparty activists and grass-roots organizers.

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Even at that early juncture, Deace said, Cruz was probing whether it was feasible to unite various elements of the conservative base — libertarians, evangelicals, tea party activists — behind one grass-roots-approved presidential candidate.

“He was here to say, ‘Hey, I’m here to find out from you whether this was possible, the only way this is going to work is if conservatives can unite behind a candidacy,’” Deace said. “Was it possible to put libertarians and evangelicals on the same team?”

The answer wasn’t clear then, nor was it apparent when Cruz became the first candidate to announce for president the following March, only to be quickly overshadowed as others joined the race.

Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum were all vying for the evangelical vote and already enjoyed reservoirs of goodwill from that constituency. Rand Paul, whose father scored a robust 21.5 percent finish in Iowa in 2012, was the clear favorite among libertarians. And Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was already viewed as a strong contender in Iowa, where he was thought likely to unite Christian conservatives and business types.

But only Cruz, who burst onto the national stage as a tea party star during his 2012 upset Senate victory, was already strategizing about how to strengthen his evangelical and libertarian bona fides and capitalize on his existing tea party activist support to become the consensus conservative choice.

And on Monday night, his success in uniting and turning out those voting blocs propelled him to victory. His first-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, by a 28-24-23 margin over top rivals Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, cements Cruz as the conservative standard-bearer of the party and gives him momentum headed into New Hampshire and South Carolina.

By that day in August of 2014, Cruz knew which voters he needed to win over. Here’s how he did it.

***

The meeting drew people with significant experience in the evangelical community, including Bryan English, a skilled grass-roots activist, and Chuck Laudner, the operative who helped propel Santorum to his 2012 victory by logging countless miles around the state in his pickup. Joel Kurtinitis, a prominent libertarian leader, was also in attendance.

And by early 2015, that confab had paid dividends: Kurtinitis had abandoned the Paul faction for Cruz;English, after five months of deliberations, signed up with the Cruz campaign before the senator’s March announcement, joining as Iowa state director, while several of the other key activists in the meeting were either on board with Cruz or open to joining him. Laudner had gone to work for Trump, but the bombastic businessman was barely on the radar.

But as Cruz’s campaign got underway in Iowa, things didn’t go as hoped.

Deace was sitting on the sidelines, despite receiving a personal walk-through of the Cruz campaign’s theory of the case at a Houston hotelbefore Cruz announced. Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent leader in the Christian conservative movement, made clear to Cruz that he would stay neutral until much later in the cycle. And Iowa Rep. Steve King, one of Cruz’s relatively few congressional allies who had been so helpful in making introductions over the past two years, was also sitting out.

“The individual wooing we thought would work did not work,” Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe said, going on to add, “I don’t think it’s good enough to just be good on their issues, I don’t think it’s good enough just to have a record. I think they have to feel like they’re joining a winning movement.”

***

As the summer of 2015 began, there was little evidence that Cruz was leading any sort of movement in Iowa, despite two years of courting Iowa conservativesand, to a lesser extent, libertarians; speaking at Christian cattle calls and attempting to broaden his national tea party brand to also include evangelical bona fides.

His poll numbers here lagged amid anticipation of Walker’s entry into the race — the Wisconsin governor had dominated the Iowa buzz since stealing the show at a King-hosted confab in January. Cruz had visited the state only a handful of times since announcing for president, while Huckabee and Santorum, winners of the Iowa caucuses in 2008 and 2012, respectively, were aggressively working to rekindle the magic with evangelicals in the state. Cruz showed up only sporadically over the rest of the summer, raising eyebrows in Iowa when he instead spent a week in the South in August.

But behind the skeptical headlines — when he generated headlines at all — Cruz and his campaign were quietly fundraising and organizing. English was particularly focused on recruiting county chairs and shoring up evangelical support.

His message to pastors: Conservatives needed to coalesce early around one candidate to ensure that the nominee was, for once, not the establishment pick. Pastor Joseph Brown of Washington, Iowa, assisted by recruiting supportive pastors in all of Iowa’s 99 counties, a project encouraged by Cruz’s wife Heidi on the senator’s first trip to Iowa after announcing. And Cruz kept up his relationship with David Lane, the host of the influential Pastors and Pews series well-attended by presidential candidates (Cruz had asked Lane, as early as July of 2014, whether he would help him with evangelical outreach in a presidential campaign. Lane insisted on being an “honest broker” but was impressed with what he saw as a serious effort on Cruz’s part to engage the Christian conservative community).

Meanwhile, Cruz’s father, Pastor Rafael Cruz, boosted his son’s name identification as he kept up an intense schedule of church visits across the state. Other campaigns were miffed that at Christian conferences over the past several years, there were often two entries under the Cruz name. But Rafael Cruz was a key entry point for pastors, whom he urged at church gatherings over the summer to take a hard look at his son.

“It’s one thing to meet a senator, it’s another thing for a pastor to meet and talk with a pastor, a guy who speaks your language, knows your heart, knows your struggles,” said Pastor Mike Demastus, who is backing Cruz. “There’s a connection point with Pastor Rafael Cruz. He’s one of us, he knows who we are. He has been, pardon the pun, a wonderful secret weapon for Sen. Cruz.”

***

By the end of August 2015, Cruz was ready to make his move.

He saw a fresh opening as Walker, aiming to appeal to both the establishment wing of the party and the conservative base, increasingly alienated both. Paul, who struggled to raise money, had not emerged as the threat he was once expected to be, with some of his father’s most prominent supporters staying on the sidelines and Cruz actively playing for the libertarian base with appearances at libertarian-leaning confabs and the support of people like Kurtinitis.

And after intensively building out infrastructure in the Southern states over the summer, fortified by a strong start to his fundraising, Cruz wanted conservative Iowa bigwigs to know that his campaign was capable of “going the distance,” in contrast to Huckabee and Santorum, who were lightly funded and had little infrastructure in the later-voting states.

That helped sell Deace on Cruz, and he endorsed him that month, becoming one of the most prominent conservatives in the state do so.

Cruz also made that case to King in a meeting in a building on the Iowa state fairgrounds. The congressman had been an admirer of Cruz’s for years, with their friendship cemented in May of 2014 over a five-hour steak dinner at the Capital Grille in Washington. And he was impressed by the detailed fundraising goals and long-term organizational plan Cruz discussed.

But he was concerned about Cruz’s opposition to the Renewable Fuel Standard, the ethanol mandate deeply important to Iowa’s farmers, particularly in King’s district in northwest Iowa. Cruz, however, had backed legislation that would phase it out.

“That’s the meeting where I emphasized most strongly I wanted him to embrace my position in favor of the RFS,” King said. “And I turned up my salesmanship … Yet I couldn’t sell the idea to Ted. And that’s when he looked at me and said, ‘legislation I’ve authored and co-sponsored is my word, my word is my bond, I will maintain my position.’”

Cruz was interested, however, in having King help flesh out his position on the issue. So into the fall, King’s staff worked with Cruz’s to hammer out an ethanol position paper that would be more acceptable to farmers but wouldn’t contradict Cruz’s past work on the issue.

“I made the case that without a sound ethanol policy, Ted would have significant vulnerabilities in the caucus,” King said. “I think that’s turned out to be true. Even with a good policy, he’s had some vulnerabilities.”

Despite the help he offered on ethanol, King remained unwilling to pick a side, like the highly influential Vander Plaats, at a time when Ben Carson was on the rise with evangelicals, while Trump, who caught fire over the summer, continued to drown out most of the other candidates and Laudner worked to build a ground game in the state. Cruz increasingly came to realize he needed to generate momentum with the evangelical grass roots, not just their leadership.

“We went to a lot of these folks right when we got in,” Roe said. “We thought we’d get a lot of them right away. Instead, we got nobody. So instead, we went to their flocks and convinced them to have their leaders join.”

***

To help stoke enthusiasm among religious Chrisitans, Cruz put on an elaborate event in Des Moines in which he played part preacher, part therapist as he sat onstage with people who ran into legal problems over, for example, refusing to do floral arrangements for a gay wedding. Meanwhile, his campaign continued recruiting pastors. And when Walker dropped out on Sept. 21, Cruz snatched up some of his grass-roots support.

All the while, Cruz kept Trump close, insisting at every turn that he liked and respected him, while privately being skeptical of his staying power, confident that those sky-high poll numbers would come down and Cruz would be in a position to catch Trump’s defectors.

By late fall, Trump’s numbers had fallen only slightly — but by then, Cruz’s were on the upswing. After being badly overshadowed in the first two debates, he interjected more often at the third match, hosted by CNBC on Oct. 28. And after he laced into the media that night, his internal Iowa polls nearly doubled in the days that followed, from six percent to 11 percent.

By Nov. 1, sensing burgeoning momentum, the campaign was up with radio ads on conservative talk radio and Christian stations, in keeping with the goal of cementing Cruz as the consensus conservative choice.

Then, outside events took a toll on Cruz’s most immediate rival in Iowa: Carson. After the Paris terrorist attacks of Nov. 13, national security issues damaged the political outsider image that initially pushed the pediatric neurosurgeon to the forefront, creating an opening for someone with more experience. Cruz pounced, playing up at every turn his knowledge of foreign affairs and pushing legislation to bar most Syrian refugees from coming to the United States, as conservatives grew increasingly fearful that those migrants could pose a threat.

King was driving to Minneapolis when he heard about the bloody Paris shootings, an Islamic State-led attack that stoked concerns about Syrian refugees. The congressman was just back from a congressional trip abroad, during which he saw the refugee crisis firsthand. King, a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration, was alarmed by what he saw as “cultural suicide” in Europe, with migrants flooding in who, in his judgment, had “zero intention of assimilating.”

That Friday, he was driving to examine the Minneapolis Muslim community, visiting mosques there amid his fear that America was at risk from radicals. Around the same time, on the campaign trail, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was casting Cruz’s position on immigration reform as close to his own more centrist approach, a characterization King strongly rejected.

“At that point, I realized all of the things that will happen to America if we don’t understand demographics are our destiny,” he said, going on to add, “If I’m going to let Rubio redefine Cruz … we’re going to end up with open borders and cultural suicide, a mirror of what we’re seeing today. That was the galvanizing piece that brought it together.”

That weekend, after the Paris attacks, King told his chief of staff that he was ready to make an endorsement. She informed the Cruz team, though King, assuming the senator was busy, did not tell him personally. On Monday, King held a news conference in Des Moines to announce his backing of Cruz, even though the senator was in South Carolina and couldn’t get back to the state in time.

“There might have been a better day, but I didn’t want to choose a strategic day, I wanted to get it off my chest,” said King, who had long said that, when he came to a “conviction” on a candidate, he would make it clear immediately.

***

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Cruz was riding high. Over eggs and bacon at Johnny’s Italian Steakhouse near the Des Moines airport, Vander Plaats, the evangelical kingmaker, told Cruz he was ready to commit, citing his confidence in Cruz’s electability, and completing an Iowa conservative trifecta as he joined Deace and King, giving Cruz full entrée to a vast and active conservative Christian grass-roots network.

And for two weeks, Cruz basked in momentum: On Dec. 5, his team opened dorms to house what would ultimately be hundreds of supporters from out of state who came to town to get out the vote. On Dec. 10, Vander Plaats made his endorsement official. And on Dec. 14, a bombshell Des Moines Register poll landed, showing Cruz 10 points ahead of Donald Trump.

But the success in Iowa made Cruz a bigger target nationally, as Rubio fired away at him over immigration and national security, Trump telegraphed that attacks were coming, calling him a “maniac” in the days around a December debate, and other candidates, like Huckabee and Santorum, started piling on.

Cruz’s internal numbers started to slide as the year came to a close.

“Strap on the full armor of God,” Cruz told supporters in a New Year’s Eve conference call. “Get ready for the attacks that are coming … come the month of January, we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

***

He was right.

While Cruz was on a frenetic swing through Iowa to kick off 2016, Trump unleashed his most problematic attack yet: implying that Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother, is ineligible to run for president.

After a week of dismissing the attacks, Cruz unloaded, deciding that the issue had become too much of a distraction to ignore as it dominated days of political coverage. His team had been testing themes against Trump for months as part of routine polling (as it did with other rivals), and Cruz settled on accusing the real estate mogul of having a liberal record.

But as much as leading Republicans despised Trump, few were in any rush to back Cruz up.

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, breaking with his two-decade rule of neutrality, openly said he wanted Cruz to lose because of his opposition to the ethanol mandate. Branstad’s son, Eric, launched attack ads highlighting that position and bracketed his Iowa events, where Cruz was routinely pressed on his ethanol position. King and his son, Jeff, who was running pro-Cruz super PAC efforts in the state, fretted that Branstad’s remarks would scare off enough farmers from Cruz to give Trump the win.

Meanwhile, Trump was notching prominent endorsements, and leading Republican establishment figures publicly worried Cruz would be worse for the party down-ballot than Trump.

As the attacks mounted, Cruz’s lead in Iowa vanished, and he delivered a widely panned performance in the final debate before the caucuses, entering the homestretch before the contest apparently weakened.

Yet in the final week of the campaign, privately and publicly, the Cruz team insisted they would win a close race, pointing to their turnout organization and their analytics and data modeling. They began calling unregistered voters in the final weeks of the campaign, but detected no surge of support for Trump.

Instead of tamping down on expectations, the Cruz campaign raised them: Roe predicted a win “outside the margin of error” on the Friday before the caucuses, the day after the debate.

The only way they would lose, his campaign believed, was if they ultimately failed to consolidate enough of the conservative base.

To ward off that possibility, they had identified precise numbers of voters deciding between their candidate and Trump, Rubio and Carson. For each undecided group, they had a targeted plan involving direct mail, volunteer calls and visits and digital ads. The voters open to Trump and Rubio received negative, contrasting information, but the Cruz campaign offered only positive messages to those also looking at Carsonin the days leading up to the caucuses. Cruz also didn't hesitate to use aggressive get-out-the-vote tactics, even turning to a controversial mailer that suggested individuals and their neighbors had violated voting regulations by not turning out in previous years, a move that drew condemnation from the Iowa secretary of state.

Meanwhile, the Cruz team banked on their thousands of organized volunteers, pastors and county chairs across the state, while Cruz, his wife and father constantly called the caucus trainers to motivate them in the homestretch.

Hours before the voting began, Cruz told a crowd in Jefferson, Iowa, that he had completed his swing through all of Iowa’s 99 counties, an effort important to undertake in order to “show the respect I think anyone who wants to compete in this state owes to the men and women of Iowa.”

***

Cruz took the stage at his party Monday night, still reviled by Washington and still reveling in that scorn, just as he had a year and a half ago, when he made his initial overtures to Iowa’s leading grass-roots activists.

“You want to know what scares the Washington cartel?” he asked the crowd. “You!” several people replied.

“I don’t scare them in the tiniest bit,” he said. “What scares them is you.”

Surveying the celebratory room, Cruz claimed victory in the goal he laid out so many months before. “We’re seeing conservatives and evangelicals and libertarians and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one,” he said. “And that terrifies Washington, D.C.”